FIELD REPORT ON FIVE YEARS OF eLEARNING

Observations and Inspirations

Heiko Sturzrehm, Claire Fautsch and Peter Kropf

Institut d’informatique, Universit´e de Neuchˆatel, Neuchˆatel, Switzerland

Keywords:

eLearning, Course evaluation, Case study.

Abstract:

Due to the limitations of staff, especially at small universities, eLearning is a perfect addition to traditional

courses. Nonetheless, the development and maintenance of online courses is not trivial. The usage of these

courses can also be quite challenging for students, who are generally familiar with traditional lectures.

In this paper, we are contributing our experience in creating and maintaining online courses. We will also

describe different types of blended and pure online courses used in our department. Some of the observations

made during this evaluation do not only apply for online courses, but are also true for traditional courses.

Finally several interesting features to improve eLearning are presented.

1 INTRODUCTION

The advances in computer and network technologies

over the last decade resulted in a continuously grow-

ing availability of Internet services and networked ap-

plications. Following this development, many univer-

sities started to offer online courses.

The advancement of eLearning is not only rec-

ognized by universities, but also the industry discov-

ered the advantages of eLearning. particularly to pro-

vide continuing education to their employees. Com-

pared to a traditional course or workshop, an eLearn-

ing course does not require all participants to attend

the course at the same time. Rather, it offers partic-

ipants the opportunity to deﬁne individual schedules

that allow them to optimize their use of time. Fur-

thermore, the employer can easily oversee the profes-

sional development of his/her employees. IBM, for

example offers online training not only for its em-

ployees, but also to those of other companies (IBM

Training, 2009).

Most eLearning courses consist of text, graphics

and remote hands-on exercises. They can be used as

a complement or as a replacement for traditional lec-

tures. When eLearning content is supporting regular

courses it is referred to as blended learning.

In this paper we present an overview of current

learning methods used at the Computer Science De-

partment of the University of Neuchˆatel (Switzer-

land), as well as observations made from their usage.

The presented learning methods are in use since about

5 years. The contribution of this paper is an evalua-

tion of online and blended courses from the perspec-

tive of the tutors and developers. First, we will ex-

plain some contextual particularities of the universi-

ties in Switzerland, followed by a discussion of re-

lated work. Section 2 describes the context and back-

ground of our eLearning activities, which are then re-

viewed in the following section. Our proposals to im-

prove eLearning are presented in Section 4. Finally

we conclude our work in Section 5.

1.1 Swiss Context

In the year 2000 the Swiss Virtual Campus project

(SVC) (Swiss Virtual Campus, 2009) was launched.

Its main goal was the development of internet-based

courses at the Swiss institutions of higher education.

Nine years later, 82 courses were available covering

a wide range of disciplines, from computer science to

law or history. One requirement for the development

of these courses was that at least three different insti-

tutions had to participate in their creation.

The SVC closely collaborates with the SWITCH

foundation (SWITCH, 2009), which provides Swiss

wide IT-solutions at institutions of higher education.

One of its services is SWITCHaai, a single sign-on

solution for eLearning and web applications available

to all participating universities in Switzerland. The

SWITCHaai service (see Fig. 1) is improving inter-

operability, privacy, security and trust. Through this

large scale user management system, students can at-

317

Sturzrehm H., Fautsch C. and Kropf P. (2010).

FIELD REPORT ON FIVE YEARS OF eLEARNING - Observations and Inspirations.

In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Computer Supported Education, pages 317-324

DOI: 10.5220/0002779003170324

 SciTePress

Authorization Resource Credentials

University A

University B

Stud. Admin

Web Mail

E-Learning

Research DB

E-Learning

without SWITCHaai

University A

University B

SWITCHaai

Stud. Admin

Web Mail

E-Learning

Research DB

E-Learning

with SWITCHaai

User Administration / Authentication

Figure 1: Features of SWITCHaai.

tend all SVC courses independently from the location

of their home university.

Most Swiss universities are quite small compared

to the ones in other European countries. As a result,

the collaboration between them is well established.

One of these collaborations is the BeNeFri network

of universities (BeNeFri Network, 2009). All stu-

dents enrolled at the Universities of Bern, Neuchˆatel

and Fribourg can attend courses and acquire credits

at the other facilities. Furthermore, the schedules are

adapted to their needs taking into account that the

travel time between the facilities is at most one hour

by train.

One particularity of BeNeFri concerns the differ-

ent teaching languages. In Bern, the main language

is German, in Neuchˆatel it’s French, and in Fribourg

both languages are used in classes. However, with

the introduction of BeNeFri, more and more classes

are taught in English at all three universities. With

the help of joint online courses, the time the students

need to travel can be reduced and a larger variety of

courses can be offered to the students.

1.2 Related Work

eLearning has been regularly used at universities for

more than a decade. Consequently many of them

are evaluating those courses now. For instance,

Jung et al. (Jung et al., 2008) are focusing their analy-

sis on the acceptance of eLearning by the users. They

identiﬁed a relation between the student’s perceived

usefulness of an eLearning system and the student’s

attitude towards it. Therefore, it is very important to

explain the system to the students and to guide them

appropriately, in order to improve the student’s atti-

tude toward the course.

Dalsgaard is focusing more on the self-organized

learning aspect (Dalsgaard, 2006). He concludes that

Web 2.0 tools like wikis or blogs can be used to sup-

port independent lifelong learning. When using these

tools in a self-governed and problem-based learning

approach they could improve the learning impact.

Unfortunately eLeaning courses at universities can

not be as open-endedas proposedby him, because de-

gree programs are always aiming a certain goal, e.g.,

graduating or passing a course exam.

Concerning hands-on laboratories many imple-

mentations are available by now, e.g., VISIR (Vir-

tual InstrumentSystems In Reality) fromthe Blekinge

Institute of Technology (Sweden) (Gustavsson et al.,

2008) or our NeOS (Neuchtel Online System)

(Sturzrehm et al., 2008). Unfortunately, most of them

can only be used in a certain area of expertise. VISIR

is a hands-on tool, which allows students to perform

electrical engineering experiments from home. Some

of these experiments would normally include quite

expensive lab equipment, which can be simulated to

prevent damages, or be remotely shared between uni-

versities to reduce costs. On the other hand our NeOS

is constrained to programming tasks and could hardly

be used in other domains.

2 APPLICATION

We will start our case study with a description of

the eLearning architecture used at the University

of Neuchˆatel, followed by brief descriptions of our

eLearning and blended learning courses.

CSEDU 2010 - 2nd International Conference on Computer Supported Education

318

2.1 Technologies in Use

For the traditional lectures at the University of

Neuchˆatel the open source eLearning platform Claro-

line (Claroline, 2009) is used

. Unfortunately, often

only a few of the available features of the system are

utilized, e.g., the system is used as a storage for pre-

sentation slides or as submission portal for exercises.

Other available features included such as chat, forum

or wiki are rarely used.

Another platform, called WebCT

from Black-

board (WebCT, 2009), is used for the BeNeFri on-

line courses, which are part of the SVC. Again the

mainly used feature is the content storage, but in con-

trast to traditional lectures the content is presented in

the form of HTML documents. The evaluation of the

students’ acquiredknowledge is done using this portal

with multiple choice questions and hands-on experi-

ments.

Since some of our experiments can only handle

one user at a time, we need to schedule their access.

For those hands-on tasks, we are using a custom built

reservation system (Wulff et al., 2008) allowing the

students to reserve a time slot for conducting their ex-

periments.

In order to protect the lab machines, we are us-

ing the architecture (Braun et al., 2006) shown in Fig-

ure 2. The lab machine is protected from the inter-

net with a ﬁrewall which can only be passed through

a ssh connection. When the students want to access

the lab machine, they have to connect to the Apache

Tomcat web server (Apache Tomcat, 2009), which is

using the Shibboleth (Shibboleth, 2009) plug-in. This

plug-in serves as connectorto the SWITCHaai andthe

reservation system. After successful authentication

the student can access the lab machine via a single-

use ssh channel. Normally the access is granted for

one hour. Afterwards the ssh account is disabled.

The technologies used for the exercises are di-

verse. In one task, the students have to conﬁgure

routers and switches using a Java applet serving as

network simulator. In an other task the students have

to implementa driver for an USB radio device in the C

language. To realize this assignment, they have con-

sole access to the lab machine to which the device is

connected.

In order to generalize the implementation environ-

ment for assignments, we developed a conﬁgurable

hands-on application called NeOS (Sturzrehm et al.,

The decision to use the mentioned software is not part

of this publication, nor is this an evaluation of those plat-

forms. The presentation and discussions related to speciﬁc

eLearning platforms shall then be considered without loss

of generality.

Apache Tomcat Web Server

with Shibboleth plug-in

Lab Machine

SWITCHaai

User PC

Reservation System

Figure 2: Architecture for our hands-on tasks.

2008). It is using the same architecture as described

above and consists of a Java applet located on the

Shibboleth web server and a Java application on the

lab machine. Both parts allow users to locally pro-

gram in an editor-like user interface and then test the

program on a well secured remote machine. Dur-

ing this test run the implementation is automatically

evaluated and a feedback is returned to the student.

When their program successfully solves the task, an

encrypted ﬁle is sent to the student. This ﬁle is sub-

mitted to the course portal as ﬁnal solution. The en-

cryption enables us to identify the student and raises

the efforts needed to betray. For the decryption of this

ﬁle, so that the tutor can grade it, our framework is

aiding the tutor with a small application. This tool

is also supporting a cross check system for detecting

plagiarism in the solutions.

2.2 SVC Online Courses

Our department took part in the development of two

online courses created for the SVC. Both courses use

English as teaching language.

The ﬁrst course covers the topics of telecommu-

nications and computer networks and is called Vir-

tual Internet and Telecommunications Laboratory of

Switzerland (VITELS) (VITELS, 2009). It was a

joint development of the universities of Bern, Fri-

bourg, Geneva and Neuchˆatel as well as the Engineer-

ing School of Fribourg. Ten modules were available

covering the following content: (i) Simulation if IP

Network Conﬁguration, (ii) Client/Server Concepts,

(iii) IP Security, (iv) Sockets and RPC, (v) Remote

Method Invocation, (vi) Application Server, (vii) Se-

curity and Privacy in the Internet, (viii) Firewall Man-

agement, (ix) Protocol Analysis, and (x) Wireless

LAN. After several years of usage, only the ﬁrst seven

modules are still available, due to technical limita-

tions.

After the creation of the VITELS course, a sec-

FIELD REPORT ON FIVE YEARS OF eLEARNING - Observations and Inspirations

319

ond course was created learning from the experiences

made with VITELS. This course is covering the top-

ics of operating systems and is called Operating Sys-

tem Laboratory (OSLab) (OSLab, 2009). The partic-

ipants for this project were the universities of Bern,

Fribourg and Neuchˆatel as well as the University of

Rostock (Germany). At the moment ﬁve modules

out of seven are available, namely (i) Device Driver

and Input/Output, (ii) Process Scheduling, (iii) Mem-

ory Management, (iv) File Systems, and (v) Security.

The modules Distributed File Systems and Inter Pro-

cess Communication are still under development and

should be released soon.

Both courses follow the same general scheme ( 3)

based on Bloom’s new Taxonomy (Passig, 2003), an

updated version of Bloom’s Taxonomy (Bloom et al.,

1964). First, the topic is introduced and requirements

for this module are presented. In the second chap-

ter, the theory of this module is conveyed to the stu-

dents. It consists of replenished lectures and required

or recommended readings, e.g., papers or books. At

the end of this part, the students can perform a self

test to check their knowledge. Afterwards, they have

to prove their knowledge of the theory in complet-

ing a quiz consisting of multiple choice and free re-

sponses. In the third chapter, the students must apply

their knowledge in hands-on sessions. These sessions

are all available online, as described in Section 2.1.

Some exercises require real hardware which is ac-

cessed remotely, while for others the hardware is sim-

ulated. After mastering the hands-on sessions the stu-

dents can ﬁnalize the module with a conclusive test.

For the ﬁnal evaluation of the course the students have

to pass an oral exam to demonstrate their knowledge

of all completed modules.

2.3 Blended Learning

As mentioned previously, the Claroline platform is

used at our university for blended learning. As an

example we will present the advanced software en-

gineering (ASE) course and exercises held at our de-

partment since several years. The goal of the course

is to familiarize the students with the application of

sophisticated software development tools and devel-

opment cycles. The theory is presented in traditional

lectures with slides. Those are made available online

on the course portal a posteriori. In the exercises the

students have to solve task sheets and submit their re-

sults to the portal. The tasks range from programming

to sketching rapid prototypes. The evaluation of their

tasks is presented to them as well via the Claroline

platform.

Figure 3: Structure of our online course modules.

3 OBSERVATIONS

This section considers the observations we have made

using the two online courses, VITELS and OSLab,

and the blended course ASE. The two online courses

are offered to the students since ﬁve (VITELS) re-

spectively three (OSLab) years. The blended learn-

ing approach is already in use since eight years at our

university.

3.1 Students

A ﬁrst major observation made during ﬁve years of

eLearning is that only a motivated and interested stu-

dent is capable to fully beneﬁt from an online course.

An unmotivated student, doing the course only be-

cause he/she has to, is likely to postpone the workload

as long as possible. This will result in average perfor-

mance. In our opinion, it is therefore important to ﬁx

a schedule for each task and to present the content in

an interesting way.

Another fact that occurred to us, is the minimal

knowledge the students retain from online courses.

There is a discrepancy between the knowledge the

students think they acquired and the knowledge they

actually have absorbed. During the ﬁnal oral exams,

we realized many times that students can remember

headingsof a topic, but unfortunately not the morede-

tailed content. Or they cannot apply or combine their

knowledge. Normally, those students just printed out

the content of the course or read it online. They

missed to take notes, either electronically or on pa-

CSEDU 2010 - 2nd International Conference on Computer Supported Education

320

per. Furthermore, it seems that they are not able to

differentiate between important information and facts

included in the course and secondary or additional in-

formation.

A further problem is that not all available modules

of the proposed eLearning courses require the same

amount of work from the students, however the same

number of credits is given to each module. As a re-

sult students are preferringthe ones with the least per-

ceived effort, since they can chose which module they

take.

Also, the audio-visual absorption of knowledge

during a traditional lecture is missing, which in our

opinion improves the long term memorization. Even

though the students may not actively listen, they still

learn subconsciously (implicit learning (Cleeremans,

1997)). In addition, the tutor might spontaneously

point out important features, which is not possible

for a self-learning course. Later, when students are

preparing the exam, the probability of losing this

memory is quite high. The students concentrate them-

selves on the passing of the exam and thus forget that

the long term memorization and especially applica-

tion of knowledge are actually the main goals of their

studies.

In some of the VITELS hands-on exercises the

students had to program on a distant lab machine via

the console. With the improvement of the Internet

technologies we wanted to support them with a bet-

ter programming environment. We therefore intro-

duced the NeOS framework in the hands-on exercises

of the OSLab. It provided them with an editor-like

Java applet in which they could implement their tasks.

Nonetheless, most students just programmed in their

favorite integrated development environment (IDE),

like Eclipse (Eclipse IDE, 2009) or NetBeans (Net-

beans IDE, 2009), and copied their solutions to our

tool. According to the students’ statements, their

main reason to use an external IDE rather than the

proposed one, was the lack of automatic correction

and error detection offered by the IDE, i.e., missing

features.

In our online courses the students have to plan

their advancement on their own ensuring a maximum

of ﬂexibility. As a result, quizzes and tests are done at

different times, but still they have always the same

questions. So there is a high probability that they

just exchange the questions and answers among each

other.

3.2 Tutors

In this section we brieﬂy outline the experiences of

tutors with online and blended courses and the chal-

lenges they face. We refer to tutor as the person which

the students approachif they need any assistance. The

responsibilities of the tutor are generally limited to

maintain the course portal and guide the students. It

is thus important to offer the tutors an introduction to

the handling and usage of the respective platforms.

For eLearning courses, evaluating quizzes is also

part of the tutor’s task. Commonly used eLearning

platforms provide evaluation tools, e.g., showing the

student’s solutions as well as the expected solution.

For multiple choice tests, a pre-evaluation can be pro-

vided. This approach considerably simplify the task

of the tutor. However, the exercises and the solutions

are generally provided by the developers, knowledge-

able of the topic, at the same time the course is cre-

ated. It can thus happen that the solutions are very

short or incomplete, especially if the developers as-

sume that the tutors are also knowledgeable of the

topic, which is not necessary the case.

Another problem that might occur with predeﬁned

solutions, is that they are out of date. For instance, in

the server-client module of VITELS, one task of the

students is to collect HTML communications with a

certain web server. Over the years, the used technol-

ogy on this server changed, resulting in a discrepancy

to the original solution. Therefore there should exist

a deﬁned cycle for regular updating these courses.

For blended courses, the tutor is generally assist-

ing the course instructor. The tutor prepares and holds

exercise sessions and gives assistance to the students.

The tutor also manages the online platform for the

given course, e.g., making the slides of the courses

available, handling the submitted exercises, or mak-

ing announcements.

A problem observed using blended learning con-

cerned the evaluation of tasks. It happens that stu-

dents submit their solutions by email or by paper

rather than using the online portal. Introducing the

evaluation results in the platform can then be quite

complicated, since one can only evaluate content di-

rectly submitted to the portal. In fact, the tutor nor-

mally has to use an alternative method to store the re-

sults of the students, e.g., on paper or in spread sheets.

These other result collections are most of the time

not available online. Consequently, the students need

also to store their results externally. A solution to this

problem is to inform the students of the procedures

to be used, and grade only assignments correctly sub-

mitted.

3.3 Developers

Besides students and tutors, developers play an im-

portant role in eLearning courses. Online courses are

FIELD REPORT ON FIVE YEARS OF eLEARNING - Observations and Inspirations

321

often developed in the boundaries of a project last-

ing only a few years, but the course will be used over

a longer time period. Staff members (e.g., PhD stu-

dents) are enrolled to design the courses, however,

due to the academic environment, the staff changes

rapidly. Consequently, it is possible that different per-

sons are in charge of initial planing, ﬁnal stage, main-

tenance and tutoring. Even though each step is doc-

umented, details on technical issues, interpretation of

exercises, or content might be lost, making especially

maintenance and tutoring difﬁcult.

In most cases the content for an online course is

already available from a traditional lecture. Still, the

adaption is not trivial, since the slides of a lecture are

not presenting the whole course. Often the profes-

sors are adding additional content like examples or

explaining certain points in detail.

Another issue can occurin the development of for-

eign language courses, but not exclusively. When cre-

ating the content, typing or grammatical errors can

occur. To minimize those, peer reviews and profes-

sional editing are important and recommended. Ad-

ditionally, a cooperate design should be chosen for the

whole course to improve recognition.

4 PROPOSALS TO IMPROVE

ONLINE COURSES

In the previous sections we presented our experiences

with blended learning and eLearning. In this section,

we discuss several approaches which could improve

all kinds of blended learning and eLearning.

4.1 Motivation

In this ﬁrst part we want to point out strategies to

increase the morale of the students. Lately casual

games have become quite a big economical success,

e.g., games like Dr. Kawashima’s Brain Age for the

Nintendo DS (a.k.a. Brain Training). This game is

based on the research of Dr. Kawashima (Kawashima,

2005). Those games consist of a collection of mini

games, i.e., games which normally last just a few

minutes. With the success rate and a success graph

the user is motivated to improve and redo the games.

Those games can address many different skills, men-

tal and physical ones. For instance skills like dex-

terity, eye reaction, calculating, foreign languages or

logic can be conveyed.

Our proposal is to apply this concept as well to

eLearning courses, so the students are learning by

playing. In the domain of computer networks for ex-

ample, imagine a game where the student is acting

as a ﬁrewall and has to decide if arriving or depart-

ing packets pass or have to be blocked. The time the

student needs to process a certain amount of pack-

ets correctly can be used as indicator for their perfor-

mance. One could also support the student with dif-

ferent tools, which are an abstraction of real used ap-

proaches, e.g., black or white lists. Additionally, the

students could have the possibility to compare their

results with their colleagues or play in an attacker-

defender scenario.

Another idea concernsthe adaptionof the achieve-

ment concept also known from computer games. It is

used to award special behavior or achieved goals. In

terms of online courses it could be used to motivate

the students to solve their task very well. The reward

could for instance be a joker for another exercise or

the oral exam, i.e., the student could ask for a small

clue in a question.

4.2 Memorization

As we mentioned already in Section 3.1 it is impor-

tant that students do more than just reading the theory.

Therefore we present below features to overcome this

gap.

For instance, it could be useful that each time the

students enter the course portal, they have to answer a

question regarding already ﬁnished modules, or there

could be a pop-up window in the portal with a known

content randomly chosen. A very experimental ap-

proach could be that only students with good results

from the daily quizzes can unlock the additional or

following content.

In Section 3.2 we outlined the difﬁculties with

shifted schedules and their inﬂuence on quizzes. As

a solution we think a randomized test would be ap-

propriate. When the questions the students are asked

vary, it becomes useless to pass on the questions and

solutions to the fellow students. Of course, the de-

velopers of a course have to create more than twice

more questions and they shoould be replaced over

time. Eventually, each question could also be given a

level of difﬁculty, in order to present to each student a

variety of questions with different levels of difﬁculty.

To support students not just with plain text or pic-

tures, maybe an audio book of the content could be

helpful. They could listen to it while reading the con-

tent or doing other activities. The audio stream could

contain additional examples or could explain pictures

in a more detailed way.

CSEDU 2010 - 2nd International Conference on Computer Supported Education

322

4.3 Simplicity

Last but not least, the usability of online courses

should not be disregarded, since the student should

focus on the content and not on the handling of the

interface.

In the OSLab course (see Section 3.1), most of the

students used the Eclipse IDE. Since this is an open

source platform supportingplug-ins, we think it could

be a good improvement to create an interface to our

secured architecture. It would have the advantage that

the students can program in their usual environment

while still providing the needed security for the access

to the lab machines.

In our opinion, eLearning environments could be

improved by using a topic speciﬁc wiki for the con-

tent, which can only be edited by approved tutors.

This could be done nation- or world-wide to gather

the knowledge for a speciﬁc lecture topic. With a spe-

cial license, e.g., Creative Commons (Creative Com-

mons, 2009), the content could then be reused in other

eLearning courses, which is not necessarily the case

with books.

It could also be a great advantage to use a stan-

dard content creation language, independent from the

used content management system. For instance wiki-

or Tex-based systems would be a good solution, since

these markup languages are widely used at universi-

ties and are designed for easy content creation and

document layout.

5 CONCLUSIONS

In this ﬁeld study we presented the eLearning envi-

ronment (SVC and the SWITCH) as used in Switzer-

land. Furthermore, we described our two online

courses (OSLab and VITELS) and presented our re-

alization of the blended learning concept.

In the following parts we analyzed the attitude of

students, tutors, and developers, resulting in possi-

bly new approaches to improve eLearning as well as

blended learning courses, from the view point of the

staff.

The main observation of this paper is the high rel-

evance of the students’ motivation. Contrary to tra-

ditional courses, online courses do not have regular

schedules, where for instance the students have to

attend once a week lectures and exercises. Further-

more, the content of an eLearning course should be

presented in an attractive and diversiﬁed way in order

to keep the studentsfocusedover a longer time period.

In addition, the students should not have the impres-

sion that eLearning courses are a burden or a free ride

compared to traditional courses. Otherwise, eLearn-

ing courses will not be accepted by the students and

thus conventional courses would lead to greater suc-

cess.

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